"Why Do They Enroll in This Course? Undergraduates’ Course Choice from a Motivational Perspective"

​Third-year doctoral student Hye-Rin Lee is first author with co-authors postdoctoral scholar Luise von Keyserlingk, Professor and Dean Richard Arum, and Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Sue Eccles of an article in Frontiers in Education analyzing undergraduate students’ choice of college courses.
 
The title of the article is “Why Do They Enroll in This Course? Undergraduates’ Course Choice from a Motivational Perspective.”
 
Lee’s research interests include self-reflection, academic interventions, online learning in education, measurement, temporal motivation, and resilience in students with disabilities. As a doctoral student she has been awarded a Provost Ph.D. Fellowship, a Eugene Cota-Robles Diversity Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She is specializing in Human Development in Context (HDiC). Dr. Eccles serves as her advisor.

Hye Rin Lee

​Abstract
 
Why do students pick various courses? Interdisciplinary research has highlighted the role of structural constraints, normative expectations, and individual motivation as the joint influences of agency and structure in the service of life goals. Here, we examined undergraduates’ reasons for course choices for their most difficult and most important courses. We compared the reasons for non-major vs. major courses, for freshman vs. juniors, and across different disciplines. College students selected courses that fulfilled their major or breadth requirements, particularly in their freshman year. STEM courses were taken more for career development reasons than other disciplines, particularly humanities courses; social sciences courses were taken more for interest than STEM courses; and humanities courses were taken more for intellectual broadening than STEM courses.